Campbell Entrepreneurship & Media

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Even if you call yourself self-employed as an entrepreneur, your “boss” is technically always your customer. Your customer is the thing that you absolutely cannot function without. With no boss, there’s no job at all. If you can’t even properly identify, then, what your “boss” looks and sounds like, how can you really claim that you actually have one?

How can you quantify the worth of a job that doesn’t even have a stable foundation to stand upon and make its name known? Having no target customers essentially makes an entrepreneur nothing more than a beggar.

2. Overly Complex Marketing

There’s a study done that shows that, on average, Facebook posts that are less than 120 characters are ‘liked’ about 60% more than the average post. This isn’t because of some special Facebook mechanism, this is human psychology.

Brevity is the soul of wit, and brevity is also the bread and butter of an effective marketing campaign. If your product truly is as quality as you would like people to believe it is, then it should be able to speak for itself once people are in the same room as it; your job, as the entrepreneur, is simply to open the door.

Don’t go into a long tirade about why your thing is the best thing since the last thing; that’s going to get you ranked on the attention ladder at around the same priority as daytime television and jackhammer noises.

3. Too much and too little

Who are you more likely to put your trust in? A person that doesn’t know how to shut up and take no for an answer, or a person with no spine or enthusiasm in their own product? If the answer was either of those, it’s wrong. You can’t be too passive and you can’t be too aggressive when you’re going after a potential sale.

The key element to any sale is ‘trust’, in both you and your product. Trust is not easy to actively build up in the short amount of time that you have to present your material, so the key is to not try to force it or detract from it. Simply be honest with your customer about what it is that you have to offer them, without coming on too strong or being afraid of them, and things will unravel naturally instead of immediately thanks to a poor impression.

4. No Persistence

There’s a reason why so many brands are always saying how long they’ve been in the business; it’s because entrepreneurship is not easy. So many people hop into a business thinking that the product will fly out of their laps and sell itself; if it would do that, would we not all be salesmen?

Making sales on a consistent basis doesn’t happen until you’ve put in a degree of commitment and drive that might be seen in a professional athlete. The advice from successful entrepreneur Mr. Issa Asad is if you believe that you’re worth the push, that your product can endure, and that you have the skills to pay the bills, get a second job to fund your campaign and live to sell another day.